A Greater Fairness: May Justus As Popular Educator. PUB DATE 2000-03-00 NOTE 27P
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DOCUMENT RESUME ED 455 994 RC 023 109 AUTHOR Loveland, George W. TITLE A Greater Fairness: May Justus as Popular Educator. PUB DATE 2000-03-00 NOTE 27p. PUB TYPE Historical Materials (060) EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Adult Education; Authors; Change Agents; *Childrens Literature; Civil Rights; Elementary Education; *Popular Education; *Racial Integration; Rural Education; *School Community Relationship; School Desegregation; *Social Change; Teachers IDENTIFIERS *Appalachia; Highlander Folk School TN ABSTRACT May Justus started teaching at elementary schools in Appalachia in the 1930s. She believed that mountain schools were the center of community life and drew subject matter from the needs of the students rather than imposing a curriculum designed by professional educators. Teaching arts and crafts and operating a communal soup pot at the school, she was conducting democratically structured cooperative study decades before that became the definition of "popular education." She had published 12 children's books by 1939 when she wrote her first book that addressed a social problem--alcoholism. Her books taught children how to behave not by preaching, but by portraying children who learned to act for the family or the community, all in the context of their Appalachian heritage. She volunteered extensively at the Highlander Folk School, which focused on adult education, labor organizing, and the civil rights movement. Her exposure to black people at Highlander throughout the 1940s and 1950s led her to become committed to racial equality. Bombings of local schools and attacks on Highlander by segregationists prompted her to write children's books showing how Appalachian folks might live when their schools were integrated. In her books, the children recognize that black and white people already agree on the important things--strong families, loving parents, and strong communities that pull together in difficult times. May Justus was a true radical, an inside agitator who drew on the region's best values to enact social change. (Contains 51 endnotes.) (TD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. A GREATER FAIRNESS: MAY JUSTUS AS POPULAR EDUCATOR George W. Loveland Elementary school children filing off a bus, their backpacks and tee-shirts emblazoned with Disney characters, kept in fine by a teacher's stern glare, seem more prepared for indoctrination than education. These kids are learning to obey rules, that being a "good citizen" means molding oneself to the system. Questioning the fairness of that system will usually earn them a low "conduct" grade or a phone call to their parents from a school administrator. Yet the renowned Brazilian author and educator, Paulo Freire, argued that true education is revolutionary. Through his work with illiterate peasants, he found that when the politically and economically oppressed read and think critically about social forces they begin to seek ways to challenge the status quo.1 As Richard Shaull has said, when this happens, "Education isonce again a subversive force." 2 This concept of motivating the poor and oppressed through education to create more just societies has come to be known as "popular education." While Freire was a "radical" by his own definition, he disdained all forms of dogma and sectarianism, whether from the left or right. In the preface to his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire writes: Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates.3 - U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS Office of Educational Research and Improvement MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) (?3) ahisdocument has been reproduced as r received from the person or organization originating it. 2 u nicf 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this docu- TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES ment do not necessarily represent official BL1--ES-COMAVAILABLE INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)." OERI position or policy. In this sense, neither a dogmatic Marxist nor a religious fundamentalistare radicals. Both are sectarians and make the same mistake, "...treating history in an equally proprietary fashion, [and] end up without the people--which is another way of being against them." But the radical is of the people, questioning the authority and actions of those in power with an eye toward the common good. History shows that popular education is indeed a threat to the status quo. Repressive regimes and oligarchies fear it and take swift action against its proponents. Freire himself was arrested and lived in exile for almost twenty years after a 1964 military coup in Brazil. Anne Hope, a South African nun, was arrested and exiled from apartheid South Africa in the mid 1970s. She had organized a mass literacy campaign for Steven Biko, the legendary leader of South Africa's black consciousness movement.5 And in the mountains of east Tennessee a popular educator named May Justus, a native Appalachian woman, defied the threats of the KKK and the FBI and stood up to an inquisition led by the state of Tennessee, inspiring a new generation of Southerners to topple the walls of segregation and dare to work for a peaceful, racially integrated society. In the early 1930s, May Justus and her companion Vera Mc Campbell were working at a mission school in Lee County, Kentucky, where the public schools were open for only three or four months a year. When the school year ended, those children who wanted more schooling attended the mission school. Miss Justus later described conditions in Lee County as "pretty primitive," with the mail being delivered by a mule drawn covered wagon. Life as an educator involved much more than books and lectures. There were no doctors living in the 3 county, so Miss Justus and Miss Mc Campbell delivered medicine to the sick and administered first aid to injured coal miners. Sometimes they trudged through creeks far up into isolated hollows to tend to the sick or injured. When a doctor came once a year to perform operations, they turned their school into a hospital. When someone died they held funeral services that would be formalized later when the circuit preacher came through. While the pay was only fifty dollars a month, the two young teachers received so many vegetables, chickens and support from their neighbors that Miss Justus could describe it as "good work."6 Justus and Mc Campbell had not been in Lee County long when Miss Mc Campbell's mother, who had come to live with them, developed cancer. The two teachers wanted to move the elder Mc Campbell closer to a hospital, and Miss Justus remembered a letter she had received from Dr. Lillian Johnson a couple of years earlier.' Dr. Johnson, a former college president with a history of support for progressive causes, had opened a school to help educate the people of Tennessee's Grundy County. The school was fairly traditional, with outside experts coming in to lecture the local people in areas where they seemed to need help. She wanted to recruit teachers who would come and be an active part in the community and one of the people she contacted was May Justus. 8 Miss Justus had been interested in Dr. Johnson's ideas about education for some time. Johnson believed that a mountain school should be the center of life in the community, a philosophy that Miss Justus must have felt comfortable with after her experience in Lee County. Dr. Johnson welcomed May and Vera both to the 4 Summerfield School's staff. The two young teachers had madea commitment that they would remain loyal to for the rest of their lives.9 May Justus, Vera Mc Campbell and Mary B. Thompson, from Memphis Tennessee, taught the entire curriculum from first through eighth grades. Under their leadership the Summerfield School drew its subject matter from the needs of the students rather than imposing a curriculum designed by "professional educators," a principle characteristic of popular education. May Justus describes the curriculum: One of the things we taught in school was arts and crafts. The girls made rag and hook rugs and honeysuckle baskets, and the boys made toys, bookends, book racks, anything they could make with a coping saw. We sold our crafts, some locally, and some of themwe sold through my publishers. And the school's "soup pot" met a real need as well as helping to developa sense of collective support and community. [W]e had markets in five different cities. With half of the moneywe made from the sales of the handcrafts, we bought food for oursoup pot. We were running our soup pot before there was anything like lunchrooms in this part of the state. The mothers would send me canned tomatoes and green beans, anything like that. And the children brought all sorts of vegetables from home. We had a seven-gallon lard bucket and a great old big pot-bellied stove to cook on. I would buy rice, and the various things they couldn't bring from home. And later on, another teacher would bring meat down from Tracy City where she lived. We'd peel our own vegetables and prepare everything for the soup. So many of the children have said, "We were just like a family." And school ought to be an extended family.1° This was several decades before the term "popular education" began showingup in educational theory. Yet it sounds very much like one modern definition of popular education as, "...democratically structured cooperative study....1r 11 5 It is difficult to trace the beginning of May Justus's literary career. She grew up in a house of storytellers, whose tales made up her earliest memories as well as the plots for her books.